I thought the tune was played on The Lawrence Welk Show, but then I remembered the show’s theme was Disney and that I couldn’t have fallen asleep faster to the alluring sounds of The Mickey Mouse Club Mambo.

What the hell?…

The tune in my head wouldn’t have fit the pattern. Merle Haggard would have set the set of the show on fire if his outlaw gem was in the same show as the Mickey Mouse Club Mambo.

No one could steer him right, but Mama Tried, Mama Tried…

If you check the playlist above, you’ll find some great renditions of the definitive outlaw song:

Merle Haggard’s (studio cut)

Johnny Cash

Grateful Dead at Woodstock

Everly Brothers on the Smothers Brothers Variety Show (What the F*CK?)

The more I research for Book of Blues Prequel and the farther along I go in Plan B, the more I can’t escape the bond between Country & Western Outlaws and Blues leaders. I didn’t place “Mama Tried” in the Book of Blues – nearly a shame but for the fact I can put it in the Prequel, and perhaps the Blues Book Sequel. I think I know how I’d do it to.

But getting back to that Saturday night, as I hummed the chorus:

And I turned 21 in prison / doin’ life without paroleNo one could steer me right but mama tried, mama tried..

When I was a teenager a good many years ago when one of my friends got arrested, I started singing “I turned 21 in Prison” & most of my friends laughed and said where did you come up with that? I replied that I heard it from the Grateful Dead. It was several years after that when I realized it was actually a Merle Haggard tune. I was never a Merle Haggard fan until I heard “Okie from Muskogie” & I was in the peach orchards around my hometown smoking a little reefer & it all came home to me. All music comes from somewhere. All jazz comes from blues, blues grew into country/rockabilly/rock & roll and there’s always crossovers everywhere, even from boogie woogie from the Big Band era. Music goes across the boards no matter what you like it all originated from somewhere and it just keeps on evolving! How great is that!! Even during the 60s when my grandmother was playing her piano (& she didn’t know how to read music … she learned it from the old country church she knew) she had a boogie woogie beat to her old Baptist hymns she played and she had so much fun playing them & I had a great time listening to them with her! What great times it was back then! Those times will never be had by anynbody in this geneation & if they did they won’t appreciate any history about music. They all will think it originated with them! How sad!

natfinn

I find I have to stay away from pop radio to find those same kind of roots. Nowadays we can pick and choose the song we want to hear when we want to hear it when on the road. There’s still something to be said for those days where you and thousands of others are listening along at the same time to stories we all relate to.

And the lineage is still out there. It’s just a bit of a search to find them. Then hoping others are listening along at the same time.